Roger’s note: Africa is where we all came from, but we for the most part remain in blissful ignorance of the present day imperial pillage. Devastated by mass poverty, AIDS, lack of adequate and clean water, malarial and other epidemics; all supported by governments that are compliant with the goals of mostly U.S. economic interests. Post-Apartheid South Africa continues to wallow under ever more corrupt ANC governments; post-Arab Spring Egypt is as sold out and oppressive at the Mubarak dictatorship; Nigerian oil continues to be plundered, and the Clintons have their hand in this; post-Gaddafi Libya is in continued chaos; I could go on (actually, I couldn’t, being largely ignorant like the rest of us).

by Danny Haiphong,Tue., 05/31/2016

Africa – it’s natural resources and the labor of its people – built the economies of the West, which has no intention of leaving. The West drains Africa of hundreds of billions each year, while strangling its nations in debt. The U.S. military occupies much of the continent. “The movement against racism and class warfare in the US must defend Africa from imperialist attack and condemn US imperialism wherever it rears its head on the continent.”

The Centrality of Africa in the Class Struggle to Come

“The long history of solidarity between the Black liberation movement and Pan-Africanism should inform the struggle today.”

The continent of Africa has been kept a mystery to most people inside of the US. Since its inception, US imperialism has suppressed past and present developments on the African continent. The suppression of Africa’s history and development gave political cover for the West to reap enormous profit and infrastructural development from of the trade of Africans. Once Africans ceased existing as a commodity of slaves, the continent’s large reserves of natural resources caught the attention of US imperialism. US imperialism replaced Europe after World War II as the primary arbiter of neo-colonialism on the continent, thus cementing Africa’s centrality to the struggle for self-determination and social revolution inside of the US.

US imperial influence in Africa is multifaceted and starts first and foremost with economic strangulation. US-led “international” organizations such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have forced the majority of Africa’s people into a relationship of dependence with Western capital. US and Western imperialism havs shoved debt disguised as aid down the throat of Sub Saharan Africa to the tune of 134 billion USD annually. Yet nearly 200 billion USD per year in assets are looted from the continent, leaving the majority of African people impoverished. Africa’s dependency on the West is fueled by aid agreements that include Structural Adjustment Plans (SAP). SAPs require African nations receiving aid to make drastic cuts to healthcare, education, and infrastructure in order to guarantee repayment of debt to lending institutions.

“US imperialism replaced Europe after World War II as the primary arbiter of neo-colonialism on the continent.”

Africa has provided the imperialist system with 1.7 trillion dollars worth of capital outflow since 1970 as a result of these predatory lending policies. However, the majority of African people on the continent continue to live under conditions of poverty. These conditions could not exist without compliant, US-friendly regimes. All over the continent, the US imperialism has provided political cover for brutal strongmen of neo-colonialism. In Rwanda and Uganda, the US has sponsored regimes involved in a proxy war against the resource rich Democratic Republic of Congo. Since 1996, over 6 million Congolese have been killed at the hands of Rwandan and Ugandan-backed mercenaries.

This is but one instance of what has become a general trend on the African continent. US imperialism has expanded its footprint in Africa in recent years to compete with China’s growing economic influence. The US, being in economic decline itself, has primarily done so through the prism of the military. Just prior to George W. Bush’s departure from office, the US African Command was formed. AFRICOM, for short, was expanded under Obama’s rule and now has presence in 51 of 53 African nations.

The consequences of US military expansion in Africa have been devastating. Compliant, neo-colonial regimes have aided the US military through the expansion of drone operations, especially in the nation of Djibouti. In 2011, US imperialism overthrew Muammar Gaddafi in Libya. His proposed idea for a unified African monetary bank that dealt in gold ultimately threatened the hegemony of Washington in Africa. Libya under Gaddafi was one of the last remaining nations to both oppose Western financial strangulation as well as US military occupation in Africa. Since the overthrow of Libya’s sovereign government, there has been a proliferation in terrorist attacks that have spread the tentacles of instability throughout the entire region.

“US imperialism has expanded its footprint in Africa in recent years to compete with China’s growing economic influence.”

The plan for Africa, contrary to AFRICOM’s mission statement, is not regional stability but statelessness. US imperialism has done everything possible to keep Africa in a constant state of hunger, poverty, and underdevelopment through military means. AFRICOM has infiltrated African military forces so they can be deployed to halt China-Africa relations and keep Africa’s natural resources firmly in the grip of US and Western capital. Coups and proxy wars will thus continue with regularity under the supervision of the US military. AFRICOM’s expansion directly threatens any hope for self-determination and continental integration.

US expansion into Africa has only deepened the connection between the class struggle in the US and the liberation of Africa. Without a stronger anti-imperialist movement in the US and West, the imperialist states will continue to possess a great degree of freedom to employ resources toward the domination of the African continent. Furthermore, African resistance and liberation movements will continue to inform and instruct not only the future of the African continent, but also the futures of all peoples fighting to break the chains of imperialism.

Historically, this has manifested itself in the deep ties between the Pan-African movement in Africa and the Black liberation movement in the US. African liberation fighter Kwame Nkrumah shared a close relationship with Black liberation fighters Shirley and WEB Du Bois as well asMartin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. Each visited Ghana in solidarity with Nkrumah’s leadership in organizing a united and independent Africa. WEB Du Bois spent his last days living in Ghanafree of US anti-communist repression. Later in the century, the Black Panther Party went a step further by actualizing its internationalist political orientation with the formation of chapters throughout the world. Its largest international chapter resided in Algeria.

“Libya under Gaddafi was one of the last remaining nations to both oppose Western financial strangulation as well as US military occupation in Africa.”

The long history of solidarity between the Black liberation movement and Pan-Africanism should inform the struggle today. As African nations become more entangled in the web of US imperialism, the class struggle in both the US and Africa will become more entangled as well. This requires a movement that can organize around the day to day issues of the exploited in the US mainland and at the same explain these problems from an internationalist perspective. Zimbabwe and Eritrea are critical in this regard. Both nations remain steadfast in their opposition to AFRICOM. Despite their achievements, both nations suffer mightily from US sponsored sanctions. The movement against racism and class warfare in the US must defend these sovereign African countries from imperialist attack and condemn US imperialism wherever it rears its head on the continent as a whole.

The development of such a movement will require a great deal of education. Africa’s centrality to the imperialist world economy over the last several hundred years has made it a target of the most viscous campaign of misinformation known to human history. For many in the US and West, Africa is nothing but an uncivilized land that deserves the suffering its people have been forced to experience. Even worse, Western thought has attempted to erase Africa’s existence from the consciousness of people in the West all together. Only class struggle armed with the imperative to eliminate the vulgarity of the imperialist mind can begin to reserve this trend.

Consider the Women of Saudi Arabia and Libya

Hillary Clinton says she’s a feminist, and claimed, astonishingly, while promoting her book “Hard Choices” last year:

“Women and girls … [are] central to our foreign policy,” saying that countries that value the rights of women are “less likely to breed extremism.”

However this statement is completely at odds with her actions as Secretary of State, such as with Libya – of which it has been said was her own project rather than Obama’s – where she put her own vile agenda ahead of the rights of the nation’s women, which were until that point light-years ahead of most other Middle Eastern countries. Since the death of Gaddafi, the rights of Libyan women have been rolled back by decades, with them now having to leave the house covering their heads, if not also their faces. It should be noted that the leader of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) – Abdelhakim Belhadj – whose group was backed by NATO air strikes and who afterwards had his photograph taken with Washington’s leading warmongers John McCain and Lindsey Graham, is now said to be leading ISIS in Libya.

Clinton was also central to the “Friends of Syria” group, an ironic name if ever there was one, which advocates for the violent overthrow of the country’s President Bashar al-Assad. Syria is also one of the few countries in the Middle East where women are treated as human beings. In November, Al Arabiya reported that nightlife has returned to the besieged ancient city of Aleppo. In the government-held half women dance the night away underneath the lasers, even on weeknights…whilst in the rebel-held part of the city, cafes and restaurants are divided into men only and family sections, and women do not leave the house without their husbands. Clearly following the example set by Saudi Arabia – perhaps the most oppressive country on earth in terms of women’s rights.

On the Israeli-Palestinian issue she has staunchly defended Israel’s massacres in Gaza, and has said that if she were the Israeli Prime Minister, she would not give up “security” in the West Bank – suggesting that she does not support a two-state solution.

Therefore, Hillary proclaiming herself a feminist, and her claim that women’s rights are important to the Obama administration’s foreign policy, is crude and absurd. As Kelley Vlahos wrote in The American Conservative last year:

Hillary Clinton just may prove to be what the defense establishment has been waiting for, and more. Superior to all in money, name recognition, and influence, she is poised to compete aggressively for the Democratic nomination for president. She might just win the Oval Office. And by most measures she would be the most formidable hawk this country has seen in a generation.

“It is clear that she is behind the use of force in anything that has gone on in this cabinet. She is a Democratic hawk and that is her track record. That’s the flag she’s planted,” said Gordon Adams, a national security budget expert who was an associate director in President Bill Clinton’s Office of Management and Budget.

Karen Kwiatkowski, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who has spent her post-service days protesting the war policies in Iraq and Afghanistan, is more blunt. “Interventionism is a business and it has a constituency and she is tapping into it,” she tells TAC. “She is for the military industrial complex, and she is for the neoconservatives.”

Clinton’s record as Secretary of State can be summarised by her response when asked about Gaddafi’s death in an interview: “We came, we saw, he died.” This was followed by a period of laughter that can only be described as giving the impression of her being in a state of pure ecstasy. Evidently, to Clinton, the brutal killing and sodomizing of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi – himself thinking he was surrendering under the safety of a white flag – was a foreign policy achievement to be proud of. If the African nation’s women and girls were central to her objectives in the now failed state that is Libya, Hillary Clinton is certainly no feminist.

Sophie Stephenson is an American History postgraduate student at the University of Edinburgh, with a particular interest in US foreign policy and relations with the Middle East. She can be reached at: sophie_stephenson@outlook.com.

His lines may be better delivered, but Barack Obama is sounding – and acting – more like the heir to George W. Bush than the change-maker sold to the public in his award-winning ad campaign. Indeed, when not sending billions of dollars to repressive governments across the globe, the great liberal hope is authorizing deadly drone strikes and military campaigns in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen and now, in his most morally righteous war yet, Libya.

Strutting out to a podium before an audience of uniformed military personnel – wonder where he got that idea from – a confident, some would say cocky, American president offered a fierce albeit belated speech justifying another preemptive war against a country that posed no threat to the United States. And if you closed your eyes, you could almost hear that faux-Texas drawl.

“As Commander-in-Chief, I have no greater responsibility than keeping this country safe,” the president declared, adopting his predecessor’s favorite title for himself. “I’ve made it clear that I will never hesitate to use our military swiftly, decisively, and unilaterally when necessary to defend our people, our homeland, our allies and our core interests.”

Put another way, President Obama says he will only start a war – without consulting Congress, much less the public – when it is absolutely necessary for defending the “homeland” or for, you know, whatever he deems an “interest.”

Enter Muammar Gaddafi, a caricature of a tyrant who the Obama administration just a matter of weeks ago was looking to sell $77 million in weapons, including more than 50 armored troop carriers. Back then – mid-April – Gaddafi was a thuggish but reliable client in his old age. And he happened to rule over a country that has the largest oil reserves in Africa.

Funny how friendship works.

But a few short weeks ago, Gaddafi became unreliable – a public relations nightmare – when he started using the weapons he purchased from his erstwhile allies against his own people. Like Saddam Hussein before him, he became a liability.

So now Obama believes Gaddafi to be a “tyrant” who has lost his “legitimacy” – as if there was anything “legitimate” about his previous 42 years of dictatorial rule. On Monday, the president argued war was necessary to prevent Gaddafi from massacring rebel forces and their supporters in Benghazi. Such a massacre “would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world,” said the war president. “I refused to let that happen.”

I – me – the imperial president. Cue the commander-in-chief landing on an aircraft carrier.

But if the threat of a massacre is what spurs President Obama to action, what are we to make of his reaction to Israel’s massacre of more than 1,400 Palestinians during Operation Cast Lead in Gaza, or what Amnesty International calls “22 days of death and destruction? Giving Israel an additional $30 billion in American weapons is a rather curious response, no?

And what about the hundreds of civilians killed by drone attacks in Pakistan since Obama took office – as many as 1,850 according to the New America Foundation? In early March, the very administration cloaking its new war in moralizing rhetoric carried out a massacre of 40 Pakistani civilians – a massacre the president who authorized the attack couldn’t even be bothered to comment on.

Right now, the Obama administration is actively supporting brutal regimes in Yemen, Iraq and Bahrain – to name a few – where protest movements are being violently suppressed on the American taxpayers’ dime. And the Obama administration is selling $60 billion in weapons to the Saudis, who not only oppress their own dissidents but recently occupied neighboring Bahrain and violently cracked down on peaceful protesters there with the U.S.’s stamp of approval.

So if one thing’s clear, it’s that the U.S. government is fine with tyranny – when it’s “pro-American” (business). Fancy rhetoric aside, there is no “freedom agenda.”

Speaking to reporters this week, Obama’s Deputy National Security Advisor Denis McDonough conceded as much, saying that the White House doesn’t “make decisions about questions like intervention based on consistency or precedent.” Rather, “We make them based on how we can best advance our interests in the region.”

And as history professor and war supporter Juan Cole helpfully notes, the rebels control significant swaths of oil-rich territory and have taken “key oil towns” thanks to the U.S.-led bombing campaign – of 200 cruise missiles fired so far, 193 have been fired from American warships. They are also on the verge of taking 80 percent of the Buraiqa Basin, writes Cole, which “contains much of Libya’s oil wealth.”

Bingo: We just found “our interests.” And unsurprisingly, they don’t involve protecting innocent people from being killed so much as they do protecting the natural resource on top of which they’re dying – and then having the freshly liberated locals pick up the tab for American contractors to rebuild everything American missiles destroyed.

But even assuming Obama has the best of intentions – with which the road to hell is paved, mind you – U.S. intervention in Libya is more likely to do harm than good. Besides the inevitable “collateral damage,” meaning widowed mothers and orphaned children, war sets off an unpredictable chain reaction of evil – evil that no side has a monopoly over.

Indeed, The Los Angeles Times reports that while the intervention is sold as in defense of human rights, the Libyan rebels on whose behalf the U.S. is intervening are actively rounding up hundreds of their perceived political opponents and imprisoning them without charge in Gaddafi’s former torture chambers. Those being rounded up are primarily black immigrants, with rebel spokesman Abdelhafed Ghoga telling the paper that suspected Gaddafi mercenaries who don’t voluntarily turn themselves in will be subjected to extra-judicial “justice” (read: murder) for being “enemies of the revolution.” If they seize the country, who will stop roundups – and massacres – in Tripoli and elsewhere of those deemed to be supporters of the Gaddafi regime, perhaps for no reason other than the color of their skin?

U.S. official have publicly acknowledged an al-Qaeda presence among the rebels, bringing to mind U.S. support for the Afghan mujahideen in the 1980s. And with the self-proclaimed leadership consisting of former top-level Gaddafi cronies who had no problem with the regime’s human rights abuses four weeks ago, those lionizing the rebels – and suggesting the U.S. illegally arm them — should take a closer look at who the U.S. and its allies are preparing to put in power when Gaddafi’s gone.

The Obama administration and supporters of the war — who a month ago couldn’t tell the difference between Benghazi and Baghdad — portray the intervention in Libya as a simple morality tale, with evil on one side and good on the other. But the reality is more nuanced than the applause lines the president laid out in his speech. In the real world, peace is rarely achieved by dropping bombs and installing the most avowedly “pro-American” locals you can find in power. Just look at Afghanistan and Iraq, where George Bush started wars that Barack Obama has only continued – and in the case of the former, escalated.

“Some nations may be able to turn a blind eye to atrocities in other countries,” Obama said this week. “The United States of America is different.” And credit where credit’s due, he’s right: From Gaza to the Arabian peninsula, Obama doesn’t stand idly by while others carry out atrocities – he funds and arms those carrying them out.

And just like Bush, he doesn’t let his hypocrisy get in the way of a good war.

Charles Davis (http://charliedavis.blogspot.com) is an independent journalist who has covered Congress for NPR and Pacifica stations across the country, and freelanced for the international news wire Inter Press Service.